Friday, April 10, 2015

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce her
candidacy for the presidency online Sunday. Then, within a few days,
Clinton will travel to an early voting state. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, first reported that Clinton would announce this weekend, and the Guardian was first to report that it would take place Sunday.

Clinton's new epilogue to her 2014 book, "Hard Choices," released Friday with the paperback version and published on the Huffington Post,
seems to hint at her pending announcement and some of the themes of her
candidacy, in the part where she reflects on the birth of her
granddaughter, Charlotte.
"Rather than make me want to slow
down, it has spurred me to speed up," she wrote. Children "drive us to
work for a better future," one which Clinton sees as globally
interconnected. She continued, "If the United States continues to lead
the world in the years ahead, as I believe it can and must, it will be
because we have learned how to define the terms of our interdependence
to promote more cooperation and shared prosperity and less conflict and
inequality." READ MORE

Walter Scott was “outgoing—loved everybody, [was] very known in the
community and got along with everybody,” his brother Anthony Scott told
CNN.

Walter L. Scott, 50, was a father of four who served in the Coast
Guard and had trouble making child support payments, but he was not a
violent man, according to his brother Anthony Scott, who spoke with CNN's Don Lemon Tuesday.

"He was outgoing—loved everybody, [was] very known in the community
and got along with everybody," Anthony Scott told Lemon. "All the family
loves him, and his kids loved him."

The world now knows Walter L. Scott's name after graphic footage of
what appears to show Scott running away from a North Charleston, S.C.,
police officer as the officer fatally shoots him. Officer Michael Slager
reportedly stopped Scott Saturday morning for a traffic violation.

According to a police report viewed by CNN, Scott allegedly refused
to comply with Slager's orders and allegedly tried to take the officer's
stun gun. In the video of the incident, it appears that the stun gun
may have already been used by the officer and dropped as the two men
struggled. Scott then runs away from the officer, who opens fire. The
officer returns to where the first interaction took place and picks
something up from the ground, walks over to Scott's prone body and drops
something next to him. It is still unclear why Scott is running away
from the officer in the footage, but family attorney Chris Stewart told
Lemon that it was no reason for the officer to fire his gun.

"Running from an officer doesn't result in the death penalty," Stewart said. READ MORE

Here Is What You Need to Know About SC Officer Michael Slager

Before North Charleston, S.C., Police Officer Michael Slager fatally
shot 50-year-old Walter Scott, he had been subject to two complaints,
including a separate complaint about inappropriate use of force, for
which the 33-year-old cop was exonerated, NBC News reports.

According to documents released by the North Charleston Police
Department, the news site notes, the U.S. Coast Guard veteran faced a
complaint in September 2013, when he was accused of using his Taser
against a man and slamming him to the ground for no reason. The case was
investigated and Slager, who has been with the department since 2009,
was exonerated.

A more recent complaint, in January, accused the officer of failing
to file a police report, NBC News notes. That complaint was sustained,
although it was not made clear whether the veteran cop faced discipline,
or what kind.

David Aylor, who was Slager’s attorney at the time, pointed out that
his client had “no disciplinary issues” while he was at the department
and wrote in a statement, “Officer Slager believes he followed all the
proper procedures and policies of the North Charleston Police
Department,” according to Bustle.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos on Tuesday argued over the objections
of retired NYPD Detective Harry Houck that the shooting of an unarmed
South Carolina man was just the latest in an "epidemic" of police
officers killing black men.

After video surfaced
on Tuesday of North Charleston Officer Michael Slager, who is white,
shooting 50-year-old Walter L. Scott in the back as he fled, Van Jones
explained to CNN host Anderson Cooper that there would have been no
murder charges if the incident had not been recorded by a cell phone.
"We see this over and over again, the police report says, 'This black
man is dangerous, 'I was so afraid for my life, oh my God, I had to do
something, he was going to kill me,'" Jones noted. "And now we finally
have something where nobody can say that the police report was true, and
you get this murder charge."

"But what if there had been no video? What if it had just been
another situation where another unarmed black man was killed and the
police officer said, 'Well, he grabbed me, he had my weapon,' and we
would have all gone on as if nothing happened. We have to start dealing
with the fact that there are two standards of justice in this country."

Oh, come on. We all know why they want to pass this bill -- they want cops to get away with abusing and killing people! (As long as they're the right people.)

The right to record, in addition to being upheld by the appellate courts, is one of the best tools we have to deter police violence, and to see that those who break the law are held accountable -- as we just saw last night:

A bill introduced in the Texas House of Representatives would make it illegal for private citizens to record police within 25 feet.
House Bill 2918, introduced by state Rep. Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) on Tuesday, would make the offense a misdemeanor.

Citizens who are armed would not be permitted to record police activity within 100 feet of an officer, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Only representatives of radio or TV organizations that hold an FCC license, newspapers and magazines would have the right to record police. The legislator disagreed with people on Twitter who said he's seeking to make all filming of cops illegal. READ MORE

Rand Paul didn't do himself any favors while trying to defend getting testy with yet another female reporter.
Saying that you're just a hot head who can't control his temper doesn't
appear any more presidential than being a condescending sexist.

Oy. So Rand Paul had a bad morning
on the TV, when he got testily obnoxious and all mansplaining about how
to do journalism with Savannah Guthrie. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no," he screeched at her. "Listen, you've editorialized. Let me answer a
question. You ask a question, and you say, 'Have your views changed?'
instead of editorializing and saying my views have changed."
In a later interview, Paul further explains how journalists are allowed to cover him.

In an interview in New Hampshire with The New York Times,
after the appearance on "Today," Mr. Paul said he gets tired of
questions with the built-in premise that he has contradicted himself.
Questions, he said, like "'O.K., well we understand that you've been
beating your wife for years and you've flip-flopped on 25 different
issues and you used to believe this and you used to believe that,'" he
said. "That isn't journalism."

Funny thing is, when it was Sean Hannity
asking about the same flip-flops, Paul didn't blow up. He answered.
Lamely, but he answered. So Hannity asking about the same things as
Guthrie must have been journalism, while Guthrie asking about it was
"editorializing." You could chalk it up to the fact that it was Hannity
and Fox News, or you could look at Paul's previous testy interactions
with female journalists. Like when CNBC's Kelly Evans asked him about a
tax incentive proposal he came up with for U.S. companies to bring
their overseas profits back to the United States and about his position
on vaccination. READ MORE

Neither Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky nor New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie was invited to address the NRA’s Leadership Forum, NRA
officials confirmed to The Tennessean.
“We have a really lengthy program and we have the longest list of
potential presidential candidates to speak at the Leadership Forum this
go-around, and we just could not accommodate everyone,” Jennifer Baker,
director of public affairs for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative
Action, told the Nashville paper. READ MORE

While guns may be be great in churches, schools, universities, bars
and sitting in handbags next to toddlers in Walmart shopping carts — the
National Rifle Association (NRA) isn’t so keen on guns at their Annual
Convention.

The convention (April 10-12 in Nashville) is expected to draw a crowd
of 70,000 people. Naturally all of them are do-gooders — there to
ogle, stroke and cling to the “16 acres of guns” (according to an ad for
the event). Among the 555 Exhibitors (according to the NRA’s event
website) are Smith & Wesson, SigSauer, Beretta USA and Remington
Arms. So will there be guns? — you betcha. Will they work? — uh, no.
Sorry, but these guns won’t fire.

According to the security plan that was adopted by the NRA soon after
Nashville was chosen to host their annual convention — all guns on the
convention floor will be nonoperational with the firing pins removed.
In addition, any guns purchased during the NRA convention will have to
be picked up at a Federal Firearms License dealer (near the purchaser’s
home) and will require a legal identification (I expect they mean at the
time of pickup of said merchandise.)

Speakers include
Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush (the white one, not the one of hispanic origin),
Scott Walker, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Ted
Cruz, Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham — and of course the
perpetually-validation-seeking Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. And for
those with a nostalgia for treason, Oliver North will be making a booth
appearance. Ted Nugent is also scheduled because Freedom is not Free and We the People Must Keep It Alive! Well, true nothing stinks more than dead freedom -- except maybe rank hypocrisy. READ MORE

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton: losing his grip on reality, or lying
shamelessly? It's not clear which conclusion would be more unflattering
to Cotton in light of his claim that bombing Iran's nuclear facilities would be just like when
then-President Bill Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in the late
1990s. It's just silly to think about the Iraq War of the 2000s,
according to Cotton—silly, or a lie pushed by President Obama—"the
president is trying to make you think it would be 150,000 heavy
mechanized troops on the ground in the Middle East again as we saw in
Iraq and that’s simply not the case." Simply not the case!

“It would be something more along the lines of what
President Clinton did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox.
Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For
interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council
resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough
as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill
Clinton was.”

In short, Tom Cotton, 2015: "Several days air and naval bombing ... "
Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, on the prospect of war with Iraq: "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
Uh-huh. About that ...READ MORE

In two interviews, Rand Paul has declared that what Rand Paul used to
say is now off-limits. It's not fair, Paul testily claims, to ask him
about stuff that he said before he decided to be a presidential
candidate. Because that was before, or "a long time ago." As long ago as 2009, when he was a Senate candidate.
Sean Hannity, not surprisingly, let him get away with it. On the
previous Paul statement that the idea of Iran being a threat to the
United States is "ridiculous":

"You know, things do change over time," Paul said. "I also
wasn't campaigning for myself, I was campaigning to help my father at
the time."

Hannity let that slide. He allowed Paul to frame his opposition to
new sanctions that would scuttle the Iran negotiations as his way of
telling Obama he'd "have to bring a deal back to" Congress.

After Hannity shot him a total softball wrapped up in a lie: "What is
your take on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—and the Indiana bill,
the 1993 bill signed by Hillary Clinton's husband?" Of course, the
Indiana RFRA and the federal RFRA are not exactly the same. That's not
going to bother Hannity, but it did give Paul a chance to erase some of
his previous disasters on civil rights. Of course, what he gave was totally gobbledygook,
but Hannity just skipped over it and went to commercial. When he came
back, he casually mentioned that Paul "took a shot at Dick Cheney back
in 2007," but before he could go further, Paul jumped in with that was
"before I was involved in politics for myself. […] That was a long time
ago." Actually, the comments came in 2009, just before Paul began
running himself. But Hannity, once again, let it slide. READ MORE

“Funny as in humor wise? Yes. Not because it was racist or
biased, just funny because it was just funny jokewise,” Twitty said. “I
feel bad because that's not, I don't want people to look at me and say
‘she sent those racist jokes out because she's racist or biased.' I am
not.”

Twitty said she was simply doing what others in Ferguson's government were doing.
“It took me a while to get over the feeling of being raped and being
thrown under the bus,” Twitty said. “I'm human, I meant nothing bad by
it.”

Blackwater's name is mud these days. That's why they've been known as Academi since 2011.
The name may have changed, but the practice of getting rich on Pentagon contracts hasn't.

Statistics released on Tuesday reveal that the rebranded
private security firm, known since 2011 as Academi, reaped over half a
billion dollars from the futile Defense Department push to eradicate
Afghan narcotics, some 32% of the $1.8bn in contracting money the
Pentagon has devoted to the job since 2002.

Academi has collected $569 million taxpayer dollars for “training,
equipment, and logistical support” to Afghan forces conducting
counternarcotics. That's twice as much as the second-largest contractor,
Northrop Grumman.

So how has that counter narcotics effort been going in Afghanistan?
If your metric is reducing the supply of opium, the results are not very good.

Afghanistan is the source of 80% of the world's illicit
opium products, according to The United Nations' 2014 World Drug Report.
Afghan opium cultivation has increased by 7% from 2013 to 2014 and
production increased as much as 17% over the same period, the UN
reported in November. "Authorities "are worried that a record opium
harvest in Afghanistan will flood global heroin markets this year,"
Reuters also notes.

Opium is one of the primary sources of revenue for the Taliban
and is partly responsible for the resurgence of the group, which has
caused President Obama to delay the withdrawal of our troops.
Of course the Afghani government takes an even bigger share of the narco-money than the Taliban does. Afghanistan is considered by many to be a narco state.

Evidence continues to mount that the Republican states which filed amicus briefs for the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell Supreme Court Obamacare challenge lied to the court. Over the past few months, Huffington Post has been examining
various states' documentation of policy meetings, legislative hearings,
local news reports, speeches, etc. to find any evidence at all that
state lawmakers talked about pre-King what they now say they all
knew—that the law was written to exclude subsidies to people buying
health insurance on the federal exchange.

A very strong case in point:
Alabama. Republican Gov. Robert Bentley had actually campaigned on
setting up a state-based exchange, and initially pushed hard to make it
happen. That included setting up the Alabama Health Insurance Exchange
Study Commission, which was tasked with determining costs, processes,
working with stakeholders, etc. Did the possibility that the state's
residents couldn't receive the subsidies if the state didn't create an
exchange ever come up?

"No. No. No. That was never, never brought up," [state Sen.
Jim McClendon (R)] McClendon said in an interview with The Huffington
Post last month. "I was unaware of that stipulation in the Affordable
Care Act, and I would almost have to guess that anybody involved in this
process was not aware of it. I was a little surprised when it came up
eventually. Nope. I was the chairman of the commission and I was totally
unaware of that."
READ MORE

Derrick Wheatt, Laurese Glover, and Eugene Johnson
moments before being freed by the judge

In 1995, three young men, just high school students at the time—Laurese
Glover, then 17, Eugene Johnson, then 18, and Derrick Wheatt, then
17—were railroaded by the Cleveland police and prosecutors office for a murder they didn't commit.
Maintaining their innocence, they served the next 20 long years in
prison, but were just released after years of legal support from the
Ohio Innocence Project.

On multiple occasions both Glover and Wheatt were offered a deal to
serve no jail time whatsoever if they testified against Eugene Johnson,
but for 20 years they refused to do so, maintaining that all three of
them were completely innocent.

On Feb. 10, 1995, in East Cleveland, Ohio, 19-year-old
Clifton Hudson Jr. was found murdered, shot multiple times. At the time,
witnesses reported seeing a person wearing dark clothing and a dark hat
at the scene. Three juveniles — Wheatt, Glover and Johnson — happened
to be near the scene. But, they emphasized, when the shooting started,
they sped off. All three later provided the police with descriptions of
the shooter that matched the basic descriptions given by other
witnesses. But in a twist of events, they were charged with the crime.

While Ted Cruz isn't the first to come up with a jurisdiction-stripping
scheme for the nation's judiciary, it is still a radical idea. It's the
type of idea that would get him the attention of religious right
conservatives ... likely lots of positive attention from them. Many of these folks have been apoplectic over the idea that the SCOTUS will likely rule in favor of marriage equality this year.
From Think Progress:

In the likely event that the Supreme Court brings marriage
equality to all 50 states this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wants to
strip the entire federal judiciary of its power to hear cases brought by
same-sex couples seeking the right to marry, according to the Dallas
Morning News.

Cruz’s remarks came during a speech in Sioux City, Iowa, where the
tea party senator also praised the original, more
discrimination-friendly version of Indiana’s new “religious liberty” law, and claimed that a cabal of liberals and big business endorsed a “radical gay marriage agenda” which says that “any person of faith is subject to persecution if they dare” disagree with marriage equality.READ MORE

Former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party and
all-around awful human being, Todd Kincannon, was arrested a couple of
weeks ago for criminal domestic violence.

An arrest warrant alleges Kincannon was driving on St.
Andrews Road and Harbison Boulevard near Irmo when the pair began to
argue. At that point, Griffith said she rolled her window down to yell
at passing motorists for help while she pleaded for Kincannon to stop
the car.

Kincannon, according to the incident report, began speeding through
traffic, but eventually stopped the car at the Chick-Fil-A on Harbison
Boulevard. Griffith told deputies that she tried to exit the vehicle in
the parking lot, but Kincannon grabbed Griffith's arm in order to
prevent her from leaving.

At that point, according to the incident report, Griffith began to
hit Kincannon until he sped up the car in an effort to prevent her from
leaving the vehicle. The report continues, and says Griffith then dialed
911 so the dispatcher could hear Kincannon. A short time later, the
report says, Kincannon saw a patrol car and "freaked out." Kincannon
then told Griffith that he would drive their car into a concrete barrier
if the police got involved, the report says. READ MORE

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a strong opponent of President Barack Obama’s diplomatic efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program, suggested on Tuesday
that armed conflict with Tehran could be easily contained to “several
days of air and naval bombing” and would not require the deployment of
American ground troops. The comments eerily echoed the false predictions of Bush administration officials on the eve of the Iraq invasion.

Appearing on the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch radio
show, Cotton slammed Obama for suggesting that military confrontation
was the only alternative to diplomacy in preventing Iran from obtaining a
nuclear weapon.

“This president has a bad habit of accusing other people of making
false choices, but he presented the ultimate false choice last week when
he said it’s either this deal or war,” Cotton said, before adding, that
“Even if military action were required…the president is trying to make
you think it would be 150,000 heavy mechanized troops on the ground in
the Middle East again as we saw in Iraq and that’s simply not the case.”

“It would be something more along the lines of what President Clinton
did in December 1998 during Operation Desert Fox,” he continued.
“Several days air and naval bombing against Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction facilities for exactly the same kind of behavior. For
interfering with weapons inspectors and for disobeying Security Council
resolutions. All we’re asking is that the president simply be as tough
as in the protection of America’s national security interest as Bill
Clinton was.”
But American military leaders — who worked for lawmakers of both
parties — strongly disagree with Cotton’s assessment, arguing that an
attack could actually prove a regional war and further push Iran towards
the bomb. READ MORE

The Colorado Civil Rights Division recently ruled that Azucar Bakery in Denver did not engage in illegal discrimination when it refused to make cakes with anti-gay messages on them.
In March of 2014, Marjorie Silva, owner of Azucar, refused to make cakes
that included two Bible verses: “God hates sin. Psalm 45:7″ and
“Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2[2].” The cake design
was also to include a portrayal of two grooms holding hands in front of a
cross with a red “X” over them. The man who made the request, one
William Jack, proceeded to file a complaint against her for
discriminating against him based on his “creed” as defined by Colorado
law.
A decision letter from the Division ruled in Silva’s favor. She did
not discriminate against Jack because of his religious identity, but
because his request included “derogatory language and imagery.” Her
standard against such language is consistent across protected classes.
“In the same manner [she] would not accept [an order from] anyone
wanting to make a discriminatory cake against Christians, [she] will not
make one that discriminates against gays,” the decision reads. “The
evidence demonstrates that [Silva] would deny such requests to any
customer, regardless of creed.”

As UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh predicted,
Colorado law protects discrimination against people based on their
belonging to certain classes, not based on their ideas and messages.
Consistency is a factor to assessing this, which is why Silva won, but another Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, lost his case
when he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Phillips
never even gave the couple a chance to discuss the artistry of the cake;
despite selling wedding cakes to different-sex couples, he refused to
sell the same product to same-sex couples. Though he argued that his
religious beliefs simply forbade him from “participating” in a same-sex
wedding, Administrative Law Judge Robert Spencer found that this was
just a pretext for anti-gay discrimination. “Only same-sex couples
engage in same-sex weddings,” he wrote. “Therefore, it makes little
sense to argue that refusal to provide a cake to a same-sex couple for
use at their wedding is not ‘because of’ their sexual orientation.” READ MORE

And Bessinger wasn’t just an unapologetic racist, he also believed
that his right to discriminate flowed from the Lord Almighty himself.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned whites-only lunch counters, “contravenes the will of God,”
according to a lawsuit Bessinger brought claiming he should be exempt
from the law. The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling 8-0 in Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises that Bessinger’s claim that a religious objection could authorize discrimination was “patently frivolous.”Piggie Park was resolved in 1968, but Bessinger’s legal
claim that religion should provide a license to discriminate rears its
head over and over again in modern American history. It reared its head just over a week ago in Indiana,
when religious conservatives briefly pushed through legislation that
could have enabled them to ignore local ordinances protecting against
anti-LGBT discrimination.

Yet, while the argument that religious objections can authorize
discrimination is not new and has not typically fared well in court, the
tactic anti-gay groups deployed in Indiana — enacting a law expanding
the scope of “religious freedom” for the very purpose of protecting discrimination
— is of much more recent vintage. As marriage equality appears more and
more inevitable, and as the nation as a whole grows increasingly
sympathetic toward LGBT rights, opponents of these rights hope to build a firewall against America’s broader culture. And this firewall rests on a foundation very similar to the arguments Maurice Bessinger once presented to the Supreme Court. READ MORE

A critical piece of the handgun
apparently caught on the man's pants as he stood up, according to
Altoona police officer Christy Heck. The safety apparently was not
engaged, she said.

The man, whose identity police did
not divulge, was very slightly injured, police said. The bullet grazed
the man, who was "beyond lucky," Heck said.

According to Altoona Police
Department Sgt. Marshall Worling, Altoona Police Department
administration and Blair County District Attorney officials will do more
consulting before deciding whether charges will be filed.

Bishop Mark L. Bartchak and the man declined to comment afterward.

Just before the hymn at mass the shot was fired.
The shot had to echo for ages.

Over the Easter weekend, just about every right wing pundit was
expressing faux outrage over their trumped up war on
Christianity/Judaism. This was to be expected, since they do it every
religious holiday. This year, it was a little worse than normal due
primarily to the blow back Indiana Governor Mike Pence received for
passing the Right To Bigotry Law and because Madison, Wisconsin passed a law protecting those that aren't Christian or Jewish.

Leading into the weekend, Scott Walker finally had memorized his
answer to the expected question about Indiana's debacle. And as
expected, Walker put his foot into it, calling those opposed to
Indiana's law as chronic complainers:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told a conservative crowd this week that
people around the country protesting Indiana's religious freedom law are
"looking for ways to be upset about things."

Indiana has come under fire — and the state has faced the threat of
business boycotts — because of a law approved last week that critics say
would allow businesses to discriminate against gays for religious
reasons. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, has defended the law,
but on Thursday signed a follow-up measure aimed at ensuring businesses
could not engage in discrimination.READ MORE

Fox's George Will with the latest bit of Obama derangement syndrome
on foreign policy. Coming from the man who supported the invasion of
Iraq until he decided he was against it,
who apparently believes President Obama is a "failure" because he
hasn't snapped his fingers and forced the rest of the world to bend to
our will.

From this weekend's Fox News Sunday,
here's Will blaming Obama for honoring Bush's status of forces
agreement in Iraq, along with Putin and Netanyahu's bad behavior.

WALLACE: George, there are obviously concessions in any
negotiation. Did President Obama and the West give up too much or is
this a reasonable deal?

WILL: Well, what was given up that really matters was given up a
while ago, that is they conceded the right to enrich, the capacity to
enrich and the possession of some low enriched uranium.

This deal comes in the fourth quarter of an Obama presidency that has
been characterized in foreign policy by four failures: the failure to
leave a stable Iraq, the failure of the Russian reset, the failure to
advance the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, and the failure to
suppress the proliferation of al Qaeda emulators and franchises, if you
will. READ MORE

The Kansas wholly-owned Senate is slated to approve draconian
restrictions on welfare recipients, some of which are the most petty,
mean-spirited ones in the nation. Huffington Post:

Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to get more than
$25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Republican
Gov. Sam Brownback's desk by the state legislature.The bill
also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at
certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers,
swimming pools and cruise ships.
"We're trying to make sure those benefits are used the way they were
intended," state Rep. Michael O'Donnell (R) said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. "This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life."

That $25 per day limit means those recipients will not be able to pay
their rent without withdrawing said $25 with a corresponding 85-cent
processing fee on a series of days ahead of the due date. I guess they
get to choose between eating and paying rent?

Monday, April 6, 2015

In one of its first actions, the Republican House of Representatives
of the 114th Congress, changed its rules to manufacture a Social
Security crisis.

GOP Representatives Tom Reed and Sam Johnson
introduced a procedural rule change, which was buried on page 30 of 32
in House Resolution 5. It forbids the House from transferring money
between the Social Security Retirement Fund and the Social Security
Disability Fund, a move that Congress has made 11 times in the past,
irrespective of which party was in control. The result is that the
Disability Fund, which is expected to run out of reserves next year,
cannot be helped using money from the Retirement Fund. Without this
“easy fix”—as the New York Times called it—recipients of Social Security
Disability will see a 19% cut in benefits.

At a glance, this move
by the GOP-led House seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive.
But if you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

Odds
are you've never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have
become a "successful" president, Republicans never would have taken
control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been
impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

When
Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most
Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski).
Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious
right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people's
bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover's economic worldview. In
Hoover's world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction
with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a
virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to
Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of
things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys
– the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves –
who ruled Wall Street and international finance. READ MORE

Just because they don't get as much coverage as ISIS or Boko Haram doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently released an in-depth
report on terrorism in the United States. Covering April 2009 to
February 2015, the report (titled “The Age of the Wolf”) found that
during that period, “more people have been killed in America by non-Islamic domestic terrorists
than jihadists.” The SPLC asserted that “the jihadist threat is a
tremendous one,” pointing out that al-Qaeda’s attacks of September 11,
2001 remain the deadliest in U.S. history. But the study also noted that
the second deadliest was carried out not by Islamists, but by Timothy
McVeigh in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995—and law enforcement, the SPLC
stressed, are doing the public a huge disservice if they view terrorism
as an exclusively Islamist phenomenon.

The report, in a sense,
echoed the assertions that President Barack Obama made when he spoke at
the National Prayer Breakfast in February and stressed that Muslims
don’t have the market cornered on religious extremism. In the minds of
far-right Republicans, Obama committed the ultimate sin by daring to
mention that Christianity has a dark side
and citing the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as two examples
from the distant past. Obama wasn’t attacking Christianity on the whole
but rather, was making the point that just as not all Christians can be
held responsible for the horrors of the Inquisition, not all Muslims can
be blamed for the violent extremism of ISIS (the Islamic State, Iraq
and Syria), the Taliban, al-Qaeda or Boko Haram. But Obama certainly
didn’t need to look 800 or 900 years in the past to find examples of
extreme Christianists committing atrocities. Violent Christianists are a
reality in different parts of the world—including the United States—and
the fact that the mainstream media don’t give them as much coverage as
ISIS or Boko Haram doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

Below are six extreme Christianist groups that have shown their capacity for violence and fanaticism.READ MORE

At any given time, we face a limitless array of threats and possible
harms. For instance, right now, we could worry about terrorism, climate
change, gun violence, unemployment, immigration, food security or any
number of other concerns. Yet public concern over these issues is
neither constant nor necessarily linked with the actual level of threat.
What
turns a potential threat or harm into a full-blown social problem? How
does what the foreign-born work force is smoking become a national
crisis, worthy of repressive action, as it has here repeatedly? And how
does a few hundred thousand people smoking crack in the 1980s translate
into a solid majority of Americans saying drugs were the number one
problem in the country in the fall of 1989?Social constructionists
say, in short, that we define such panics into existence. For a
phenomenon to become a social problem, the theory goes, someone—a claims
maker—must define it as a problem and convince others that it is one.

When it comes to drugs, both interest groups and moral entrepreneurs
have been leading claims makers. Moral entrepreneurs seek to claim that
a given social phenomenon is a social problem, that they have the
solution, and that they deserve the resources to deal with it. Interest
groups that benefit by claiming a stake in the definition of drug use as
problematic include law enforcement, the medical community (i.e. drug
treatment providers), lobbyists for corporate (typically pharmaceutical)
interests, community groups, and religious leaders among others.

Every
social problem needs to have deviant groups orr individuals, people who
aren't "like us" but who are the problem and who should be feared. This
process allows us to unpack primal fears—about sex, race, and the
Other—and use those fears to mobilize a social response. These appeals
to fear are a powerful tool, and moral entrepreneurs and interest groups
know it.

If moral entrepreneurs and interest groups manage to whip up enough fear and anxiety, they can create a full-blown moral panic,
the widespread sense that the moral condition of society is
deteriorating at a rapid pace, which can be conveniently used to
distract from underlying, status quo-threatening social problems and
exert social control over the working class or other rebellious sectors
of society.READ MORE

The Guantánamo Bay war court is now costing US taxpayers over $7,600 per minute, according to new Pentagon figures.

Carting the necessary personnel and support to the remote Cuban base
has escalated costs for the military commissions, a memo from the top
Pentagon commissions official indicated. The controversial tribunals at
Guantánamo have attracted criticisms over their inefficiency from their
inception, in addition to international concerns about their capacity to
distribute justice.

The Pentagon estimates come as the chief prosecutor in the
commissions proposed relaxing major secrecy restrictions preventing
defense lawyers from addressing torture inflicted on defendants by the
CIA and its international allies – the first suggested classification
changes for the war court after the Senate released portions of its
landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

Vaughn
Ary, the retired marine two-star general who oversees the commissions
as the chief convening authority, declared his dissatisfaction with the
tempo and cost of the tribunals in a December memo. READ MORE

Lawsuit with 800 plaintiffs seeks damages for individuals, spouses and
children of people deliberately infected with STDs through US government
programme

Nearly 800 plaintiffs have launched a billion-dollar lawsuit against
Johns Hopkins University over its alleged role in the deliberate
infection of hundreds of vulnerable Guatemalans with sexually
transmitted diseases, including syphilis and gonorrhoea, during a
medical experiment programme in the 1940s and 1950s.

The lawsuit, which also names the philanthropic Rockefeller
Foundation, alleges that both institutions helped “design, support,
encourage and finance” the experiments by employing scientists and
physicians involved in the tests, which were designed to ascertain if
penicillin could prevent the diseases.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine held “substantial
influence” over the commissioning of the research programme by
dominating panels that approved federal funding for the research, the
suit claims.

The lawsuit asserts that a researcher paid by the Rockefeller
Foundation was assigned to the experiments, which he travelled to
inspect on at least six occasions.

The suit also claims that predecessor companies of the pharmaceutical
giant Bristol-Myers Squibb supplied penicillin for use in the
experiments, which they knew to be both secretive and non-consensual.

The experiments, which occurred between 1945 and 1956, were kept
secret until they were discovered in 2010 by a college professor, Susan
Reverby. The programme published no findings and did not inform
Guatemalans who were infected of the consequences of their
participation, nor did it provide them with follow up medical care or
inform them of ways to prevent the infections spreading, the lawsuit
states.

Orphans, prisoners and mental health patients were deliberately infected in the experiments.READ MORE

Sunday, April 5, 2015

While Fox News cheered on the Indiana "religious freedom" bill as a
way to protect Christians, they sure don't feel the same way about a
Wisconsin ordinance, pushed by the evil Freedom From Religion
Foundation, which protects atheists. On this morning's Fox &
Friends, we learned that this action is anti-Christian because
Christians have a right to discriminate against atheists!

Paragon of tolerant Christianity, Tucker Carlson reported that
Madison, Wisconsin is now including atheists as a protected class.
Jesus BFF, Anna Kooiman set the propaganda message in asking Fox's
favorite race baiting, GOP activist, and former DOJ attorney J Christian Adams "where does this hostility come from." Adams informed us that the measure was driven by the Freedom From

Religion Foundation whichisoneofFox'sfavoritetargets for its patented war on atheists and atheism. In Fox's Christian crusade, Adams described the group as "a bunch of angry atheists." (As opposed to the perennially pissed off Christians who host Fox News shows?) READ MORE

From a demographer's perspective, "generations" are groups of people
born within a specific time period who share something in common.
Generations are shaped by extraordinary circumstances: perhaps by long
wars and economic difficulties, but equally by peace and prosperity.
While generations are usually felt to have specific beginnings and ends,
such as the baby boomer generation that resulted from the return of our
servicemen from the Second World War, people are being born all the
time, which means that oftentimes, the specific beginnings and ends of
generations are somewhat malleable.

With that caveat, however, the year 1982 is widely accepted as the
beginning of the millennial generation. The oldest of us are just
hitting our 30th birthday, like I did last month. And as we enter our
fourth decade of existence, it seems as good a time as any to reflect on
who we are and what we have been through. We're not monolithic; no
generation is. But we do have common experiences, and those experiences
have shaped our values as a generation. Eventually, we will be America's
political and economic leaders; some of us already are. But when we are governors, senators and presidents, what might an America run by millennials look like?

Let's start with who we are. We will be the first generation in some
time not to idolize Ronald Reagan; not because we don't respect his
political ideology (though that may be the case), but simply because
only the oldest of us have any recollection whatsoever of his
presidency, and a six-year-old's hazy memories aren't worth much. For
us, the Cold War is a part of history that was before our time, not part
of the world we grew up in as a day-to-day reality. That's not to say
that our geopolitical reality has been any more pleasant; for most of
us, the attacks of September 11, 2001 were childhood experiences. Our
constant reality since then has been wars and occupations, terror alert
codes, recessions, eight years of George W. Bush, and a faith-destroying
economic catastrophe. But we'll get to that in a minute. READ MORE

You get the sense, observing the shifting cultural
landscape, that we've reached a point on gay rights that is similar to
that moment in a football game, or an election, or a relationship, when you know it's over even though it's not over.

It appears increasingly obvious that social acceptance of gay men and
lesbians and insistence on their equal rights are inexorable.

It certainly looked over for Maggie Gallagher,
National Organization for Marriage and her financial benefactors from
the Mormon and Catholic Churches in New Hampshire and Maryland this week.
But would the conservative Christian industry ever willingly euthanize the goose laying the golden eggs? READ MORE

No doubt you've seen many charts over the last few months breaking
down income inequality in the United States. However, looking at the way
money moves through the system, doesn't really capture how badly askew
our nation really is; how fragile it is, and how few people really hold
the controls.
Instead of looking at income, let's take a look at a broader measure of fiscal inequality. Let's look at wealth.

Wealth rolls together a number of items. It's the cash you have in
the bank, the savings bonds gathering dust in a drawer, the stocks and
bonds that make up your 401k. For the better off, it's corporate bonds,
municipal bonds, foreign bonds and other instruments. It's your pension,
if you have one. It's the stock your corporation gives you to stick
around because you're such a valuable fellow. It's that vacation home in
Florida, that other vacation home outside London, that other vacation home... or maybe the other six. It's the personal ownership you have in a business. It's your family trust.

In short, it's the total of all your net assets, minus the value of
your primary residence (be it ever so humble or oh so grand) and your
debts. So what does America look like in those terms?

It's a staggeringly uneven distribution, with 42% of the wealth in
the hands of 1% of the people. Even so, a chart like this doesn't begin
to really capture how lopsided the nation really is.
Let's take a look at one of those 80-percenters. READ MORE

I have a new and self-imposed policy that I follow when I see a news
report of some bull-headed politician proposing some law to put
low-level drug possessors in prison. That rule? Follow the money, of
course.

Because something hideous is festering under the surface of these
laws. It's the private prison lobby, which makes campaign contributions
to secure harsher penalties. You see, these prison companies are in need
of warm bodies, since they can put those people to work inside the
walls of those prisons. The companies double-dip, too, pulling in a
guaranteed sum from the state in addition to whatever they can make with
their legalized slave labor. Weed offenders are just the sorts of
people these prison profiteers are looking for. They're mostly
non-violent people who will comply. They can be put to work without much
worry.

Tougher marijuana possession and dealing penalties could be
added to a proposed overhaul of Indiana's criminal sentencing laws by
legislators after Gov. Mike Pence questioned whether the plan was strict
enough on low-level drug offenders.
READ MORE

I am tired of letting Republicans and Tea Party supporters co-opt the
term "conservative". Republicans are not conservatives... they are
radical fundamentalists and we should be referring to them as such.
From the Dictionary: conservative

By their own definition... they are fundamentalists.
From Conservapedia

A conservative is someone who adheres to principles of
personal responsibility, moral values, and limited government, agreeing
with George Washington's Farewell Address that "religion and morality
are indispensable supports" to political prosperity.

Nobody can deny the fact that Christianity has played a huge
role in our history. From the first Thanksgiving to the ideas of Jesus
Christ that are embroidered in our culture today, Christianity and the
Bible is responsible a big part of our heritage.

However, many conservatives will take this fact way out of context. They'll think that you have
to be a Christian to be patriotic, which is simply not true. Following
the more secular teachings of Jesus Christ (being charitable, loving one
another, treating strangers with kindness) is what the men who founded
this country were for.

I don't want to waste my time listing all these obscurant far-right
arguments, so instead I'll list the facts straight from our forefathers. READ MORE

A story from a fake news website has apparently led the Colorado Republican state senator who thinks fried chicken causes black and Latino poverty to file a bill
prohibiting the use of food stamps or other government aid at marijuana
dispensaries, even to purchase things that could be legally obtained
elsewhere with the public assistance. (Food stamps can only be used to
buy food, remember.)

Last week, the satirical National Report
posted a fake story entitled “Colorado Pot Shop Accepting Food Stamps –
Taxpayer Funded Marijuana for Welfare Recipients.” Other stories on the
site include equally false items such as “Colorado Pot Shop Attempts To
Disarm Citizens With ‘Weed for Guns’ Buyback Program,” “How Obama’s EPA
Is Taking Away Your 2nd Amendment,” and “U.S. Caves to Iran In Nuclear
Deal. Sharia Law Now to be Taught in U.S. Universities. Qurans to be
Placed in Motel Rooms.” A conservative news site picked up the story, apparently duped. The Douglas County Republican Committee, also apparently believing the story real, linked to the report on its Twitter feed last Tuesday. READ MORE